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Franchise Hockey Manager 2 v2.2.8 Update changelog:
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Our second update for FHM2, version 2.2.8, has just been released.

Your existing savegames will be compatible with the updated game, but any fixes involving the database updates will require a new start to be fully effective.

General Note: The main focus of this update is providing the actual NHL opening-night rosters to you as quickly as possible. But we've also used the time to make a few more fixes and changes, as detailed below. At this point, now that the first two updates are out we're now going to shift to working on things that require more complex coding and multi-day testing. We'll let you know about the likely date for the next update as soon as we can make a reliable estimate.

NHL Update: the roster update was completed late on Tuesday, so the new rosters reflect the player moves up to Wednesday morning; the only major move that happened too late for inclusion was Scott Gomez signing in St. Louis. Starting injuries have been updated as well, so the players who are out right now should also be injured on opening night in the game. Some very late shuffling between the AHL and NHL in the last few hours before opening night isn't reflected, although we did manage to predict some of those moves correctly. Now that the NHL has sorted itself out, we should see rosters in other leagues stabilizing in the next week or two, which will allow us to get them into a more finalized state. As suspensions aren't in the game at the moment, Raffi Torres is included with San Jose (although his ratings reflect his long layoff.) NHL front office staffs still need some work on certain teams.

And while we were testing this update, we also did the official FHM2 Stanley Cup prediction for 2015-16: Rangers over Blues. Details to be posted on our blog site, blog.ootpdevelopments.com.

New Additions:

1. The Search screen (magnifying glass icon) now displays all players, rather than requiring a text search to be entered.

2. A League option has been added to the Filter dialog.

3. CSV output option is now available in all games, not just multiplayer ones.

Changes:

4. The fourth defensive pair, if the league uses one, is now sohown on the Game Preview Screen.

5. Lowered chance of success of very long-range shots.

6. Slightly increased number of shots from inside the offensive zone.

7. Slightly increased number of hits in the defensive and neutral zones.

8. Generation of fighting ratings in historical mode has been adjusted to prevent excessive ratings for good players who aren't particularly notable as fighters. (Note from Jeff: This will result in a noticeable decrease in PIM and fight totals in frequent-fighting eras, but not to extremely unreasonable levels; I'm still seeing PIM totals up to the high 300's and low 400's. So, don't panic if you notice lower numbers, this first step was necessary to get historical mode to the point where I can handle the final tuning of fight levels with data changes, as I did with the modern NHL. Fighting levels are very dependent on the collective availability of willing fighters within the league, so I'll now need to go through a lot of the player records by hand and set/correct their fighting ratings, as well as fix some guys whose general play style was miscategorized when I first built the database 2-3 years ago. We'll also be working on re-enabling multi-player fights and better misconduct handling at some point.)

9. More descriptive warnings and suggestions have been added to popups that will appear if the game is being played in non-Fullscreen mode at a resolution that is too tall for the computer's display resolution.

10. Staff salaries can now be edited up to $9,999,999 (was $3,000,000).

11. Upper limit on contract offers to players increased so their demands can always be met if desired (was formerly limited to $10 million.)

12. Injury proneness ratings for players generated in fictional leagues should now be much more variable instead of defaulting to 5.

13. Full team names (including nicknames) now shown in the standings on the league home screen if the resolution is >= 1280 pixels wide.

Bug Fixes:

14. We believe we've resolved the problems with the Continue/Load options after returning to the Start Screen; they haven't reoccurred yet in testing, although some versions of this were intermittent and may yet be lurking; please let us know if you have any issues in this area (e.g. not being able to click on Continue or Load, or having the game revert to the Start Screen after the loading process ends.

15. The AI should no longer sign players for human-controlled teams in a multiplayer league even when all team control settings set to human.

16. Issues with Fullscreen mode on Macs with display resolutions with heights of 768 have been fixed.

17. Corrected bug making some ratings visible only to a player in commisioner mode.

18. Timing issues fixed on opening faceoffs that led to very quick goals being recorded.

19. The Allocate Random Contracts to all players function should be working correctly now.

20. The missing scouting assignments in online leagues have been fixed.

21. Attempting to edit a coach will no longer result in his contract immediately expiring.

22. The previews for preseason games will no longer show players as having "-1" games played.

23. The play by play should now report the correct season assist total after the name of a player getting an assist, instead of (0).

24. Manual entry of staff salary amounts no longer limited to 6 figures.

25. Leagues that allow ties should now display them properly in the home/road records.

26. Finnish Liiga teams should now obey the maximum dressed skaters rule.

27. User-reported crash on October 24 fixed.

28. Crash related to incorrect Finnish team change fixed.

29. Occasional error in reporting human manager's status with his team fixed, as well as crash that resulted if the manager attempted to re-appoint himself.

30. Teams should no longer play multiple preseason games in one day when using certain league alignments.

31. Crash on first day of preseason games in fictional leagues due to lines not being set by AI teams fixed.

Data/Miscellaneous:

32. NHL rosters updated to opening night status.

33. NHL injuries updated to opening night status.

34. Updates to player data in several leagues, as well as to free agents.

35. Several duplicated players removed.

36. Some arena names updated and corrected.

37. Names file expanded.

38. Check boxes in Setup/Options screen realigned properly.

39. Fixed some news text errors.

40. Corrections and additions to various league/team history data.

41. 10 teams/2 divisions/52 games fictional league structure should work properly now.

42. German League rules have been revised, budgets and salary guidelines updated, farm-parent relationships corrected, and foreign players with missing German nationality have had it added.

43. Finnish Suomi-Sarja updated to reflect the loss of Kiekko-Vantaa It� and the new schedule; other Finnish leagues have had their rules updated as much as possible (some things, like the guaranteed promotion of Jukurit Mikkeli to Liiga in 2016-17, couldn't be done yet.)

44. Allsvenskan rosters were updated completely (thanks to Vikke Allvin for taking care of this on short notice.)

45. Slovakian 1. Liga teams updated.

Upgrading the playable European leagues is a high priority for us right now, expect to see continuted improvements in their data and gameplay soon.

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